Where Rush Is Wrong

I generally like Rush Limbaugh. Call it two Missourians sticking together but after 17 years of his show I still enjoy listening to him from time to time and on many issues we are in agreement. One recent area of disagreement (and a key on regarding the identity and future of the Republican Party) is his reaction to those who are saying the Republican Party needs to move forward in several areas. An example of his reaction to people like David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, and Christopher Buckley can be found here. But as often as he is right, here I think the great MahaRushie is wrong. What helped bring this to light was a short interview on the DVD Mr. Conservative from another conservative thinker, George Will. The question put out was whether or not Barry Goldwater became more liberal as he became older. Liberals like Al Franken were giddy in saying he had but George Will put a more thoughtful idea forward. He said that issues like gays in the military were not key in the years of Goldwater's era. What Goldwater did was take his well-thought ideals of what it meant to be a conservative and applied them to these new issues and came down on the side of literal interpretation of the Constitution and freedom to live one's life with minimal interference by the government (the bedrocks of Conservatism) and said "Nothing prevents it, so let 'em do it". Conservatism doesn't mean intellectual stagnation just as the attempts by Brooks et al does not mean giving up core conservative values nor jettison the image of Ronald Reagan. The idea, which Rush seems to miss, is that we have to take our basic values and apply them to a whole new world of issues that Reagan, God bless him, never had to face as key issues. Society has moved to new issues, in part because Conservatism won several of its fights in the '80 and '90, so we have to take the idea of what it means to be a conservative and apply them to the issues of the day. We cannot just look back at Goldwater and Reagan and sigh wistfully for the old days, we have to take the tools they gave us and move onward to build a conservative ideology worthy of the 21st century.